The broken body of Jesus Christ and His shed blood is not supposed to be a thing of academic categorization; it is not to be a thing of liturgical sacramentology. The Eucharist of Christ’s body is to be the very ground and lifeblood of the Christian’s esse, of her very existence. When I turned to Christ out of the doldrums of lukewarmity and acedia, it was at this point that I began to cling to Christ’s body as my last hope against a life of homo incurvatus in se and self-inflicted spiritual and thus moral bondage. This has become the greatest calamity of my life; i.e. the seduction of the analytic and/or academic discipline known as theology. John Webster seemed to get where this seduction has taken many a theologian over the centuries, this is why he offered an alternative dictum which he called: theological theology. But even this turn has become a locus of further academic categorization, and thus denuded of what it intended to critique. None of this was why I cried out to Jesus. I cried out to Jesus out of deep personal crises; primary of which was that I was an irreparable sinner, and I needed and continue to need the viva vox Dei (living voice of God) to encounter and contradict me afresh and anew with His Holy Holiness. I needed, and continue to need, the Bread of God’s Life in Jesus Christ every moment of everyday. This is why I read theology, and continue to read through and meditate on Holy Scripture daily. It isn’t so I can make a name for myself among the peers; it isn’t so I can leave a branded legacy for the future Church historians to notice; it is, instead, so that I can live life as a simple Christian in full dependence on the One who raises the dead.

The seduction of academic theology is way too real for certain types. A person can start out in the Spirit only to end by being perfected by the ‘flesh.’ A person like this, and we are all like this!, can start out with their first love and then be seduced into a lifelong affair incurved on the self; all along convincing themselves that what they are doing is for the Church. This sin of academizing everything in the Christian is a tricky one because it has all the hallmarks of doing virtuous things for the Church. But before the Christian knows it they have commodified the Christian life, and made it into a manageable and self-magnifying effort that elevates the person rather than Jesus Christ. I look around and I see this effort all around me all of the time. It has honestly sucked much of the lifeblood of Immanuel’s veins from my own, and thrown me back upon the very the self I’d hoped to be saved from as I cried out and cry out to Jesus. I am mostly critical of academic theology because of personal reasons; I am mostly critical of the theological guild because of how I’ve come to see how it has intruded into my life, and has attempted to thwart the very power of God in my life as a Christian.

The retort by many who might read this, or at least the internal rationalization that someone like who I am describing might be: ‘well, that’s just your problem, Bobby, I am genuinely doing what I do for the Church in my station as a theologian or pastor.’ The problem, is that I have been living in this guilded world for too long now; I have seen the carnage and impotency it has imposed upon the Christians who rationalize what they do in this way. I don’t really think I am all that unique: I, like any human being, am prone to wander. In my wandering, just like any sinner out there, I am prone to rationalize my sins in the name of Jesus Christ; like Israel of old, like Aaron I can convince myself that I threw the gold in the furnace and out popped this golden calf that I simply use to worship the triune God through (like a sacrament). I think the evidences of what I am saying are strewn all over the academic theological world. I don’t see spiritual victory there; I see mostly highly sophisticated failure. In fact I’d say most self-reflective Christians can see that carnage in this world. And hey, maybe you’re an academic theologian or biblical studies person, and you don’t deal with this sort of spiritual anemia in your life; if so, don’t apply anything I have written here to your life.

I wrote this post because once again, just prior to writing this, I was reminded of my own continual need for the broken, but raised body of Jesus Christ to be my very life.